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Fascism
The History of a Word
Federico Marcon
University of Chicago Press
A wide-ranging history of the term “fascism,” what it has meant in the past, and what it means today.
 
The rise of political figures like the United States’ Donald Trump, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, and Argentina’s Javier Milei has spurred debates on the meaning of the term “fascist” and when and whether it is appropriate to use it. The landmark study Fascism: The History of a Word takes this debate further by tackling its most fundamental questions: How did the terms “fascism” and “fascist” come to be in the first place?; How and in what circumstances have they been used?; How can they be understood today?; And what are the advantages (or disadvantages) of using “fascism” to make sense of interwar authoritarianism as well as today’s predicament?
 
Exploring the writings and deeds of political leaders, activists, artists, authors, and philosophers, Federico Marcon traces the history of the term’s use (and usefulness) in relation to Mussolini’s political regime, antifascist resistance, and the quest of postwar historians to develop a definition of a “fascist minimum.” This investigation of the semiotics of “fascism” also aims to inquire about people’s voluntary renunciation of the modern emancipatory ideals of freedom, equality, and solidarity.
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front cover of The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan
The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan
Federico Marcon
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Between the early seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth century, the field of natural history in Japan separated itself from the discipline of medicine, produced knowledge that questioned the traditional religious and philosophical understandings of the world, developed into a system (called honzogaku) that rivaled Western science in complexity—and then seemingly disappeared. Or did it? In The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan, Federico Marcon recounts how Japanese scholars developed a sophisticated discipline of natural history analogous to Europe’s but created independently, without direct influence, and argues convincingly that Japanese natural history succumbed to Western science not because of suppression and substitution, as scholars traditionally have contended, but by adaptation and transformation.
           
The first book-length English-language study devoted to the important field of honzogaku, The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan will be an essential text for historians of Japanese and East Asian science, and a fascinating read for anyone interested in the development of science in the early modern era.
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